Latest Articles from Heritage, Memory and Conflict Latest 32 Articles from Heritage, Memory and Conflict https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/ Thu, 28 Mar 2024 18:21:21 +0200 Pensoft FeedCreator https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/i/logo.jpg Latest Articles from Heritage, Memory and Conflict https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/ A virtual place of memory: Virtual reality as a method for communicating conflicted heritage at Camp Westerbork https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/71198/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 87-93

DOI: 10.3897/ijhmc.3.71198

Authors: Jitte Waagen, Tijm Lanjouw, Maurice de Kleijn

Abstract: An important goal of the project Accessing Campscapes: inclusive strategies for using European Conflicted Heritage (iC-ACCESS), has been to develop inclusive approaches for the presentation and communication of contending perspectives on Nazi and Stalinist sites (Dolghin et al. 2017). A key objective for treating these ‘heritagescapes’ has been to ‘develop state-of-the-art strategies and implement innovative tools which provide sustainable in-situ and virtual forms of investigation, presentation and representation’ (Van der Laarse 2020). A central issue which is gaining increasing attention in heritage studies and management is the dilemma of preserving and exhibiting material remnants of Wehrmacht and SS-barracks or residencies at Holocaust memorial camps which are generally framed as victimhood sites. The Commander’s house at Herinneringscentrum Westerbork is a case in point and can be placed in different perspectives on the history of the camp terrain and all related sensibilities on its meaning as an object of heritage. In order to realise an application that can accommodate these perspectives, iC-ACCESS project leader Prof. dr. R. van der Laarse contracted two laboratories specialised consecutively in 3D visualisation technologies and spatial information to cooperate on its development, the 4D Research Lab (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and the SPINlab (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). This paper illustrates the ideas, discussions and choices related to the production of the ‘Campscapes – Westerbork Commander’s House App’, provides a concise technical description of the actual application and presents a short prospection on potential future developments.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:15 +0300
Campscapes in and through testimonies: New approaches to researching and representing oral history interviews in memorial museums https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/82514/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 75-86

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.3.82514

Authors: Zuzanna Dziuban, Cord Pagenstecher

Abstract: This paper discusses the role of audio and visual testimonies in safeguarding, understanding, presenting, validating and decentering the history and memory campscapes, be it, for researchers, practitioners, memory activists, or museum visitors. Its primary objective is to present and contextualize two research tools developed within the framework of the project Accessing Campscapes: Strategies for Using European Conflicted Heritage: the Campscapes Testimony Catalogue, a new directory of oral history interviews devoted to selected camps covered within the scope of the project; and the online environment Remembering Westerbork: Learning with Interviews – a prototype of an online display environment presenting survivors’ experiences to today’s visitors in an exemplary memorial that opens up, expands and complexifies the paradigmatic narrative offered by the campscape at the on-site exhibition.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:14 +0300
“Jungle law reigned among the prisoners”: the meaning of cannibalism in the testimonies of Nazi concentration camps’ survivors https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/69956/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 71-74

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.3.69956

Authors: Kobi Kabalek

Abstract: What do Holocaust survivors do when they refer to cannibalism in their testimonies? This piece argues that they do not merely describe what they have witnessed or heard of, but also ponder the boundaries of humanity. For centuries, Europeans have made references to cannibalism in various depictions for drawing the line between “civilized” and “uncivilized.” In accordance with studies that examine cannibalism in other historical contexts, I argue that in attempting to express a sense of the radical dehumanization in the Nazi camps and convey its horror, some survivors’ accounts reconstruct the appalling reality of the camps as parallels to familiar, older stories of cannibalism that take place in remote, brutal places deprived of civilization.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:13 +0300
Exhibiting Jasenovac: Controversies, manipulations and politics of memory https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/71583/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 65-69

DOI: 10.3897/ijhmc.3.71583

Authors: Andriana Bencic Kuznar, Vjeran Pavlakovic

Abstract: The Jasenovac Concentration Camp prevails as one of the most potent symbols that continues to fuel ideological and ethno-national divisions in Croatia and neighboring Yugoslav successor states. We argue that mnemonic actors who distort the history, memory, and representations of Jasenovac through commemorative speeches, exhibitions, and political discourse are by no means new. The misuses of the Jasenovac tragedy, vividly present during socialist Yugoslavia, continue to the present day. Drawing upon the history of mediating Jasenovac as well as recent examples of commemorative speeches and problematic exhibitions, this article highlights some of the present-day struggles surrounding this former campscape.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:12 +0300
Re-emerging memories: humanitarianism and sovereignty in the Târgu Jiu Camp https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/71277/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 57-63

DOI: 10.3897/ijhmc.3.71277

Authors: Dana Dolghin

Abstract: This article briefly charts the debates surrounding the afterlife of a heritage space of political violence, the Târgu Jiu camp in Western Romania, and locates the ensuing narratives in the current contestations of the liberal democratic consensus in Central and Eastern Europe. The camp was an important Holocaust site and an equally relevant space for the early communist movement. Contrary to similar sites where competing interpretations of these histories are at play, this camp has been largely absent from debates on public memory of past political violence nationally. The significance of this space for local political history has been silenced. This article concerns itself with the long dynamic of silencing difficult heritage, its causes and implications and the selective perspectives on certain histories it entails. Târgu Jiu is a microcosm of this entanglement. Emerging in Romanian media and public debate at the time of the 2014 “refugee” reception crisis, this newly retrieved collecting memory of the camp capitalized on a history of past internal European displacement, Romanian victimhood and a sense of persecuted national sovereignty. Silencing made room for newer selective histories of this heritage space. Specifically, the complex history of the camp was appropriated into a type of politics of memory that reconfigures narratives about “liberal” values in the region. This article discusses the processes through which liberal, “European” values are appropriated and instrumentalized for the very opposite principles.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:11 +0300
Holocaust symbolism in the Belarusian memory of Maly Trostenets https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/71255/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 51-56

DOI: 10.3897/ijhmc.3.71255

Authors: Anne-Lise Bobeldijk

Abstract: This article analyzes the memorial complex that was built in 2015 at the site of the former Nazi camp Maly Trostenets. Although the complex has incorporated symbolism connected to how the Holocaust is remembered in Western Europe, it does not overcome some of the aspects of the old Soviet narrative of the Great Patriotic War.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:10 +0300
Ponar and the will to remember: Holocaust commemorations in Soviet Lithuania https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/70389/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 47-50

DOI: 10.3897/ijhmc.3.70389

Authors: Milda Jakulytė-Vasil

Abstract: This article explores the post-war history of the largest mass murder site in Lithuania, Ponar, and attempts by Jewish survivors to commemorate Holocaust victims during the period of Soviet occupation (1944–1990). The research shows that in spite of the ruling authorities creating significant obstacles for the small Jewish population to hold commemorations and over the course of the various physical transformations of Ponar, the site remained one of the most significant and most symbolic for Jewish identity and Jewish resistance to state policies.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:09 +0300
Beyond mass graves: exhuming Francoist concentration camps https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/71312/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 39-45

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.3.71312

Authors: Laura Muñoz-Encinar

Abstract: As several historical investigations have revealed, between 130,000 and 150,000 Republicans were executed during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1977). The Francoist repressive strategy – unleashed after the coup d’état of 17 July 1936 – developed complex mechanisms of physical and psychological punishment. The continuing subjugation of those still living was enacted through concentration camps, prisons and forced labour. During the War and Franco’s dictatorship, there were nearly three hundred concentration camps, and between 367,000 and 500,000 prisoners went through those camps. During the transition to democracy, neither the State nor the judiciary investigated mass crimes connected to the repression and execution of left-wing Republicans. After Franco’s death, some family groups recovered some of these bodies buried in unmarked mass graves without scientific involvement. In the year 2000, the first scientific exhumations took place, and since then, more than 400 mass graves have been opened, and up to 9.000 bodies have been recovered. The memory of the victims of Franco’s violence has been mainly centralised on mass graves. The opening of mass graves has positioned the Spanish Civil War case within the international sphere of human rights violations and has also opened a new window of opportunity for the analysis of Francoist concentration camps. In this article, I provide a holistic study of mass graves that combines archaeology and forensic anthropology with historical and ethnographic research in order to examine, in detail, both the burials and the broader landscape of the repression. In this contribution, I focus on the Concentration Camp of Castuera, in southwestern Spain, a forgotten campscape, and show how mass graves, which have become widely known as sites of research and commemoration in Spain, were closely related to the camps’ complex repressive system. My results have allowed me to conduct an integrated analysis of this context of political violence. I conclude that archaeology and forensic anthropology have played a crucial role in elucidating the functioning and social reality of Spanish camps, whilst enabling new narratives about past Francoist repression.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:08 +0300
Archaeology of Zigeunerlager: Results of the 2018–2019 investigation at the Roma detention camp in Lety https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/84017/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 31-38

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.3.84017

Authors: Pavel Vařeka

Abstract: Archaeological research in Let carried out within the framework of the Accessing Campscapes project has revealed the location, and preserved material traces, of the Roma detention camp from the period of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the area of which was partly destroyed and superseded by the industrial pig farm in the 1970s. The investigations have not only produced tangible evidence regarding the camp operation, structure, buildings and living conditions of the inmates but have also provided a means for the Roma to reclaim their neglected heritage. The planned Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia will take account of the results of the archaeological project and transform the site into a Romani memorialscape.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:07 +0300
Holocaust victims, Jewish law and the ethics of archaeological investigations https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/69978/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 25-30

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.3.69978

Authors: Caroline Sturdy Colls, Kevin Colls

Abstract: Dead bodies – and the graves in which they are interred – are often highly contested within Holocaust campscapes. Although photographs of bodies at places like Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Ohrdruf emerged in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the exhumation of mass graves of Holocaust victims for either judicial or humanitarian reasons has become something of a taboo subject. Whilst some see dead bodies in these environments as evidence of a crime, others view them as relatives, friends, and loved ones who require a proper burial, a marked burial site, or should be left undisturbed. Disputes arise between governments, communities, individuals, and religious groups when accounting for Halacha (Jewish Law) and the dead. This paper highlights how a non-invasive methodology, derived from archaeology and other disciplines, offers one way of locating and classifying graves whilst respecting the ethical sensitivities involved in their investigation. This is a growing field of research and one which has proven ability and future potential to shed new light on the crimes perpetrated across the European Holocaust landscape.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:06 +0300
Uncovering war crimes: Hidden graves of the Falstad forest https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/94923/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 19-24

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.3.94923

Authors: Marek E. Jasinski, Andrzej Ossowski, Kate Spradley

Abstract: This paper presents and discusses historical and archaeological data regarding war crimes committed by Nazi occupants during Second World War in the vicinity of the SS Prison Camp Falstad in Central Norway, and the issue of still unknown graves of executed prisoners in the Falstad Forest. Specialists from several Norwegian and foreign institutions are at present developing a set of advanced methods to be deployed during surveys of the Forest in search of hidden graves.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:05 +0300
Graves of the ‘Other’: Norway and the commemoration of soviet prisoners of war https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/71298/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 15-18

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.3.71298

Authors: Marianne Neerland Soleim

Abstract: The memory of other nationalities and their wartime suffering on Norwegian soil are mainly part of a local narrative. While the subject of Soviet prisoners of war is common knowledge in local historical studies, both oral and written, there is virtually no space for a living memory about the Soviet POWs on a national level. Despite forming the largest group of casualties on Norwegian soil during the war, the Soviet POWs have not been included at the national level of the Norwegian history of occupation.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:04 +0300
The mass graves of Hohne and the French attempt (and failure) at exhumation (1958–1969) https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/74126/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 11-13

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.3.74126

Authors: Jean-Marc Dreyfus

Abstract: The Bergen Belsen Nazi concentration camp has been widely described and studied, especially as the images taken by British troops at the moment of the camp's liberation shaped the very representation of Nazi crimes and the Holocaust. Much less-known are the debates about the exhumations of more than 20 000 corpses of inmates, the ones who died in the weeks before or after the liberation. The French mission in search of corpses of deportees, the so-called 'Garban mission', tried to negotiate the access to the camp grounds. After an international uproar and a decade of negotiations, the permission was finally not granted.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:03 +0300
To count or not to count: British politics of framing and the condition of “illegal infiltree” in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp (1945–1948) https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/70896/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 5-10

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.3.70896

Authors: Sofia Lovegrove

Abstract: This article explores the politics of humanitarian assistance in the aftermath of the Second World War, by examining the act of framing certain groups of Jewish refugees as “infiltrees”, in the context of the British occupation zone of Germany, and the Bergen-Belsen DP camp more specifically. Based on archival sources and the available literature, it dissects this legal categorisation to help understand who the different individuals categorised as infiltrees were, the wider political conjuncture that informed this framing, and the real consequences felt by those who were framed as such. This article demonstrates the extent to which the attribution of legal categories to those on the move, with tangible effects for those individuals, represents a deeply politicised practice in Europe, which has been operating at least since the first half of the twentieth century, and which continues today.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:02 +0300
From the last hut of Monowitz to the last hut of Belsen https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/97869/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 3: 1-4

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.3.97869

Authors: Robert Jan van Pelt

Abstract: The article offers an in-depth investigation into the history of, and post-war practices around, the most fundamental and indispensable architectural structure of the Nazi camps: the wooden prefabricated barrack hut.

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Research Article Wed, 10 May 2023 18:00:01 +0300
Entanglements of art and memory activism in Hungary’s illiberal democracy https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/70927/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 61-75

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.2.70927

Authors: Reka Deim

Abstract: This paper explores how art contributes to the articulation of memories that counter the official historical narrative of Hungary’s self-proclaimed political and ideological system, illiberal democracy. Amid deepening polarization between Europe’s post-colonialist and post-socialist countries, the Hungarian government promotes a Christian conservative national identity against the “liberal” values of Western Europe. Systematic appropriation of historical traumas is at the core of such efforts, which largely manifests in removing, erecting and reinstating memorials, as well as in the re-signification of trauma sites. Insufficient civic involvement in rewriting histories generates new ways of resistance, which I demonstrate through the case study of a protest-performance organized by the Living Memorial activist group as a response to the government’s decision to displace the memorial of Imre Nagy in 2018. I seek to understand the dynamics between top-down memory politics, civil resistance and art within the conceptual apparatus of the “memory activism nexus” (Rigney 2018, 2020) and “multidirectional memories” (Rothberg 2009). I argue that artistic memory activism has limited potential to transform the dynamics of memory in a context where a national conservative political force has gradually taken control over historical narratives, triggering inevitably polarizing responses in the society. Although profoundly embedded in local histories, the case-study may offer new ways of negotiating traumatic heritages through the entanglement of art and memory activism.

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Research Article Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:07 +0200
Memory, art and intergenerational transmission. Artistic practices with young people in memory sites in Argentina https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/71191/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 51-60

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.2.71191

Authors: Lizel Tornay, Victoria Alvarez, Fabricio Laino Sanchis, Mariana Paganini

Abstract: This text analyzes recent experiences with young people from Middle Schools of the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina) in Memory Sites of this city. Our inquiry is interested in the intergenerational transmission referring to the traumatic past around the last military dictatorship established in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. With this interest, two experiences designed through artistic languages are analyzed: the Posters Project from the Memory Park and the use of poetry in the guided visits to the Memory Site at "El Olimpo", former Clandestine Detention Center for Torture and Extermination, both spaces of the city of Buenos Aires.

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Research Article Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:06 +0200
Art and memory: Magdalenas por el Cauca https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/70846/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 39-49

DOI: 10.3897/ijhmc.2.70846

Authors: Neyla Graciela Pardo Abril

Abstract: Adopting an interdisciplinary framework of Memory Studies and Art and employing semiotics with a multimodal and multimedia character, it is explored how social groups in Colombia memorialise the violence of the internal armed conflict. The reflection associates the victims’ experiences with those expressions of commemoration and remembrance that are narratives embodied in visual and scenic art. It is explored how a semiotic landscape of memory is created through a performative artistic proposal. In this landscape, not only cultural frames can be determined, but also the semiotic-discursive resources that give meaning to the relationship between art and memory. The aim is to characterise the performance known as Magdalenas por el Cauca (2008) which was recorded audiovisually in several spaces on the internet. It means that, in addition to the ephemeral mise-en-scène, there are records of the performative and communicative work. In this article, we analyse the video X PEREGRINACION TRUJILLO y MAGDALENAS POR EL CAUCA (2010), one of the records that perpetuates Magdalenas por el Cauca. This reparation act is an audiovisual narrative with ethical and political character and produced collectively by relatives of victims, witnesses, artists and other interlocutors, which interpret and assign new meanings to the performance.

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Research Article Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:05 +0200
Hypermnesia and Amnesia: Remembering (with) the Body and Post-Conflict Memorials and Architectures https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/70827/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 29-38

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.2.70827

Authors: Andrea Borsari, Giovanni Leoni

Abstract: The article consists of two parts. The first part (§§ 1–2) investigates the indiscriminate and absolute remembering and forgetting of everything, hypermnesia and amnesia as the extreme terms that research has used and uses for the different phenomena of memory, both in individuals and in social and political forms. In the face of these shifts it is thus indispensable to re-establish a critique of the paradoxical effects of memory aids and, at the same time, to seek new forms of remembrance that by mixing an experiential dimension and public sphere refocus the attention on the connection between latency, tension and experiential triggers of involuntary memory and on the ability to break through the fictions of collective memory. On this basis, the second part of the article (§§ 3–4) analyses how the experience of political and racial deportation during World War II drastically changed the idea of memorial architecture. More specifically, the analysis deals with a kind of memorial device that must represent and memorialise persons whose bodies have been deliberately cancelled. The aim is to present and analyse the artistic and architectonic efforts to refer to those forgotten bodies, on the one hand, and on the other hand to point out how for these new kind of memorials the body of the visitor is asked to participate, both physically and emotionally, in this somehow paradoxical search for lost bodies, offering oneself as a substitute.

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Research Article Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:04 +0200
Trauma and allegory: truthfulness in fact and fiction. Making a private archive productive https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/70631/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 19-27

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.2.70631

Authors: Lars Ebert

Abstract: Herengracht 401 (H401), until 2019 known as Castrum Peregrini, represents the complex and intriguing history of a hermetic community of artists and scholars in Amsterdam which was formed in the years of the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands, 1940–1945.This article attempts to take stock on what we have learned in these ten years about the history of the place, as an indicator of memory politics. It also reflects on the hermeneutic gap of what we cannot know of H401’s history as we lack experiential knowledge of eyewitnesses. As the author argues below, the site of H401 shows how the ‘hermeneutic gap’ can offer a chance to make an archive, such as in the case of ‘the house on Herengracht 401’, productive and meaningful through the artistic practice of research.

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Research Article Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:03 +0200
Constant consensus building: art and conflict in the ESMA museum and site of memory https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/72349/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 7-18

DOI: 10.3897/ijhmc.2.72349

Authors: Alejandra Naftal

Abstract: This article describes the history, development and social role of the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, which is located on the grounds of the former clandestine centre for detention, torture and extermination, in the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories of the Argentinian dictatorship. The project is characterised by the cumulative effort of artistic expression, public debate, conflict and tension. Through the presentation of different artistic installations and plays, the article explains the focal function of art practices in spaces of memory that are strongly linked to a traumatic past, as well as how undertaking these practices can lead to the establishment of consensus.

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Research Article Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:02 +0200
Spaces of memory https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/78980/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 2: 1-5

DOI: 10.3897/ijhmc.2.e78980

Authors: Cristina Demaria, Anna Maria Lorusso, Patrizia Violi, Ihab Saloul

Abstract:

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Editorial Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:00:01 +0200
Sites of violence and their communities: Critical memory studies in the post-human era (Kraków, 24–25 September 2019) https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/63311/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 95-111

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.1.63311

Authors: Aleksandra Szczepan

Abstract: This discussion gathers voices of an international group of researchers and practitioners from various disciplines and institutions who focus on diverse aspects of sites of past violence in their work: archaeology, history, ethics, literature and art, curatorial practices, oral history, education and commemoration. The debate, which took place during the conference “Sites of Violence and Their Communities: Critical Memory Studies in the Post-Human Era” in Kraków in September 2019, itself centres on six main topics: the question of archives of uncommemorated killing sites; research methodology; the position of the researchers themselves; the problem of complicity during conflict and the right to be a witness to past crimes; the place of the Righteous Among the Nations within Polish collective memory and the international debate on the Holocaust; and, finally, new ways of commemoration and education about mass violence. Participants: Katarzyna Bojarska, Michał Chojak, Ewa Domańska, Zuzanna Dziuban, Karolina Grzywnowicz, Aleksandra Janus, Karina Jarzyńska, Maria Kobielska, Rob van der Laarse, Bryce Lease, Erica Lehrer, Jacek Leociak, Tomasz Łysak, Tomasz Majkowski, Christina Morina, Matilda Mroz, Adam Musiał, Agnieszka Nieradko, Łukasz Posłuszny, Roma Sendyka, Caroline Sturdy Colls, Katarzyna Suszkiewicz, Aleksandra Szczepan, Krijn Thijs, Jonathan Webber, Anna Zagrodzka, Tomasz Żukowski

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Interview Tue, 23 Nov 2021 20:00:10 +0200
Radecznica memory game. An educational workshop https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/63349/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 85-93

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.1.63349

Authors: Tomasz Z. Majkowski, Katarzyna Suszkiewicz

Abstract: The paper describes and discusses the educational workshop in the form of a board game jam held in Radecznica, a village in Eastern Poland. The event, organised by researchers from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, was a follow-up of the research project on uncommemorated Jewish mass graves in the area. The aim of the workshop was to facilitate individual reflection on local Holocaust killings amongst the participating adults, as well as to bolster the memory of mass graves in Radecznica. Combining Holocaust memories with the didactic properties of rapid board game design, it was also an attempt to employ game jams as a method in Holocaust-related education. The workshop’s success leaves us optimistic regarding the method and its possible applications in the future.

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Research Article Tue, 23 Nov 2021 20:00:09 +0200
Depth of the field. Bystanders’ art, forensic art practice and non-sites of memory https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/63264/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 73-83

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.1.63264

Authors: Aleksandra Janus, Roma Sendyka

Abstract: Abandoned sites of trauma often become objects of art-based research. The forensic turn offered artists the requisite tools to approach uncommemorated post-violence sites to interact with their human and non-human actors. The usage of artistic methods allows us to inspect nondiscursive archives and retrieve information otherwise unavailable. The new wave of “forensic art” joins the efforts of post-war artists to respond to sites of mass killings. In the post-war era, sites of trauma were presented as (implicated) landscapes, or unhospitable terrains. The tendency to narrow space to the site and to contract the perspective is continued today by visual artists entering difficult memory grounds, looking down, inspecting the ground with a “forensic gaze”. A set of examples of such artistic endeavors, following the research project Uncommemorated Genocide Sites and Their Impact on Collective Memory, Cultural Identity, Ethical Attitudes and Intercultural Relations in Contemporary Poland (2016–2020) is discussed as “bystanders’ art.”

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Research Article Tue, 23 Nov 2021 20:00:08 +0200
The “Alert” for non-sites of memory: a 1965 scout action of discovering and describing Second World War sites in Poland https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/63433/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 63-72

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.1.63433

Authors: Katarzyna Grzybowska

Abstract: During the First Scouting Alert (Poland 1965), scouts were tasked with finding and describing sites related to the events of Second World War. Those were mostly monuments, places of conflict, graves and body disposal pits. The scouts were tasked with finding such sites in their neighbourhood according to information collected from local communities. The campaign resulted in 26,000 reports in form of the registration sheets containing self-made maps, short descriptions of the found sites and answers to several questions on how to commemorate them. The Alert can be seen as a nationwide response to non-sites of memory. The article analyses the reports of the scouts, as well as considering the action as a process. It presents the political background of the action and diagnoses its influence on the results of the reconnaissance conducted - types of places to be found and registered or overlooked by scouts. In particular cases, the Alert generated opportunities during which non-sites of memory could be restored to the public awareness. The paper summarizes the campaign and focuses on two cases: Krępiecki Forest and Adampol, described to present the influence of the Alert on the memory cultures. In the neighbourhood of Krępiecki Forest, the Alert was an impulse to transform a person who saw the mass murder into a key witness. The case of archaeological investigations conducted in Adampol shows the potential of the Alert archive materials to evoke the state of unrest and to become forensic evidence

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Research Article Tue, 23 Nov 2021 20:00:07 +0200
Ceremonial events at non-sites of memory: Seven framings of a difficult past https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/63411/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 55-61

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.1.63411

Authors: Maria Kobielska

Abstract: Abstract: The author discusses uncommemorated and under-remembered sites of past violence in terms of the conditions of their transformation into memory sites. Commemorative ceremonies, which may be staged at non-sites of memory, are presented as affective media of memory and identity, demonstrating social responses to the sites, as well as placing the local past in the context of supra-local memory forms. The argument is grounded in the material gathered from fieldwork during the research project on uncommemorated sites of genocide in Poland and, predominantly, in a detailed case study of a ceremony witnessed by the author in 2016 in Radecznica (Lublin Voivodship) at a burial site of victims of the “Holocaust by bullets”. In the article the discourse of speeches delivered during the ceremony is analyzed, on the assumption that they can reveal rules of national Polish memory culture dictating what may be commemorated and how cultural mechanisms have a power to hinder commemoration. As a result, seven distinctive framings of past events that kept returning in subsequent speeches were identified and interpreted as “memory devices” that enable and facilitate recollection, but also mark out the limits of what can be remembered and passed on.

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Research Article Tue, 23 Nov 2021 20:00:06 +0200
Vernacular memory and implicated communities https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/63428/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 45-53

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.1.63428

Authors: Aleksandra Janus

Abstract: Abandoned sites of trauma in Poland appear to be forgotten, but their removal from social and cultural circles is only superficial. Frequently, these sites are inscribed into the local culture of memory and members of the local Polish communities can usually locate them and share stories about them. However, as they are not commemorated, there is an ambivalent aura around them. In 2017 two foundations (Zapomniane Foundation, The Matzevah Foundation) carried out an intervention into the landscape of Poland by marking thirty burial sites of Jewish victims of the Holocaust with simple wooden markers. The effects of that intervention shed light on the vernacular local memory of the Holocaust and the folk-traditional roots of the practices and behaviors related to these sites.

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Research Article Tue, 23 Nov 2021 20:00:05 +0200
Vernacular historical practices on Holocaust non-sites of memory in Poland https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/63351/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 37-44

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.1.63351

Authors: Jakub Muchowski

Abstract: The approach employed by memory activists to sites of memory often involves historical practices. This paper presents the results of the examination of historical practices undertaken in locations of Holocaust violence during World War II and the disposal of victims’ remains that were not memorialised properly according to local residents or other groups with an interest in the sites’ past. The analysed practices were observed in the course of field research in various locations in Poland. The goal of the research was to describe these practices, discuss their critical potential, and indicate their distinct features as activities pertaining to contested sites of memory. A central tool for approaching this task is found in concepts of “non-site of memory” and “vernacular historian” as introduced to the debate by Claude Lanzmann and Lyle Dick. As a result, the article presents the cases of four vernacular historians whose practices are experimental combinations of the components of the work of professional historians and ways of working conditioned by local cultural environments, individual experience and commitment to communal life. Although vernacular history is sometimes considered of little value by academic historians, the research shows that the practices in question have the potential to produce new, socially relevant knowledge. Two distinct features of vernacular historical practices in non-sites of memory were observed: these unmarked sites of burial attract activists and prompt them to undertake historical practices; vernacular historians of these locations often undertake unconventional, sometimes experimental activities..

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Research Article Tue, 23 Nov 2021 20:00:04 +0200
Testimoniality: A lexicon of witnesses of Holocaust non-sites of memory in Poland https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/63306/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 25-35

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.1.63306

Authors: Maria Kobielska, Aleksandra Szczepan

Abstract: The authors analyse grassroots modalities of the figure of witness in the communities living in the vicinity of uncommemorated sites of past violence. Testimoniality, understood as the disposition to bear witness, i.e. both the willingness to testify and the ability to provide important information, is discussed in relation to complex, heterogenic and dynamic assemblages that form around the sites in question, comprising both human (neighbours, wardens) and non-human actors (the landscape and biotope, material objects), diverse practices, performative gestures, and relations. The analysis is placed in the context of the debate on the complicated status of the “witness” as a category in the Polish post-war culture of memory, as well as of new relevant categories emerging in both Polish and international scholarship on the Holocaust. The authors conceptually systematise testimonial situations and propose a lexicon of testimonial positions, practices and objects that are grounded in the material gathered in fieldwork during the research project on unmemorialised sites of genocide in Poland. They distinguish: the crown witness, the trustee, the volunteer, the official and the contingent witness, and discuss categories of testimonial gesture, testimonial performance, testimonial object, and testimonial words.

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Research Article Tue, 23 Nov 2021 20:00:03 +0200
Necrocartography: Topographies and topologies of non-sites of memory https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/63418/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 13-24

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.1.63418

Authors: Aleksandra Szczepan, Kinga Siewior

Abstract: Based on the experience of spatial confusion and inadequacy common during visits to uncommemorated sites of violence, the authors propose expanding the topological reflection in the research on the spatialities of the Holocaust, as well as to introduce topology into the analysis of the everyday experiences of users of the postgenocidal space of Central and Eastern Europe. The research material is composed of hand-drawn maps by Holocaust eyewitnesses – documents created both in the 1960s and in recent years. The authors begin by summarizing the significance of topology for cultural studies, and provides a state-of-the-art reflection on cartography in the context of the Holocaust. They then proceed to interpret several of the maps as particular topological testimonies. The authors conclude by proposing a multi-faceted method of researching these maps, “necrocartography”, oriented by their testimonial, topological and performative aspects.

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Research Article Tue, 23 Nov 2021 20:00:02 +0200
Sites of violence and their communities: critical memory studies in the post-human era https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/63263/ Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 1-11

DOI: 10.3897/hmc.1.63263

Authors: Roma Sendyka

Abstract: “Sites of Violence and their Communities” presents the results of a research project that brought together scholars and practitioners of memory work in an attempt to critically reinterpret the links between sites, their (human, and non-human) users, and memory. These interdisciplinary discussions focused on overlooked, repressed or ignored sites of violence that may benefit from new approaches to memory studies, approaches that go beyond the traditional focus on communication, symbolism, representation and communality. Clandestine or contested sites, in particular, pose challenging questions about memory practices and policies: about the status of unacknowledged victims and those who witnessed their deaths; about those who have inherited the position of “bystander”; about the ontology of human remains; and about the ontologies of the sites themselves, with the natural and communal environments implicated in their perdurance. Claude Lanzmann – one of the first to undertake rigorous research on abandoned, uncommemorated or clandestine sites of violence – responded to Pierre Nora’s seminal conception with his work and with the critical notion of “non-lieux de mémoire.” Methodologies emerging from more traditional as well as recently introduced perspectives (like forensic, ecological, and material ones) allowed team members to engage with such “non-sites of memory” from new angles. The goal was to consider the needs and interests of post-conflict societies; to identify and critically read unofficial transmissions of memory; and to re-locate memory in new contexts – in the grassroots of social, political and institutional processes where the human, post-human and natural merge with unanticipated mnemonic dynamics.

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Research Article Tue, 23 Nov 2021 20:00:01 +0200